Music & Dance
CHULRUA
Minneapolis, Minnesota/ Baltimore, Maryland/ Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Irish Celtic
Paddy O’Brien is considered such a leading authority on Irish music—both as a scholar and as a traditional musician—that his music was selected for inclusion in Breandán Breathnach’s Ceol Rince na hÉireann, the foremost scholarly work on the tradition. He has collected more than 3,000 jigs, reels, hornpipes, airs, and marches, and, in 1994, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to record and annotate 500 tunes from his vast repertoire.
Originally from Ireland’s County Offaly, Paddy spent his younger days traveling the country with older players, absorbing music and the accompanying oral tradition. His early influences came from many players he met in sessions, and he also learned tunes from radio stations in the 1950s and ‘60s, at a time that traditional music was regaining prevalence in Ireland. Paddy first played in public in 1966, and in 1969, he moved to Dublin and soon attended pub sessions—apprenticeships of a sort—informal lessons on settings, augmented by stories about the music and the people who played it. In 1978, Paddy began playing regularly in the United States.
His skills on the two-row button accordion have been recognized with prestigious awards: he has been named Oireachtas champion four times and he is a 1975 All-Ireland senior accordion champion. In addition to a performing career which has spanned forty years, Paddy has taught at the prestigious Willie Clancy Summer School held in County Clare, Ireland, and three times has served as a master artist in the Minnesota State Arts Board Folk Arts Apprenticeship Program.
A native of Tipperary, Pat Egan grew up with such a love for the music, that he would take his guitar on the back of a horse and cart to school every week to get lessons from his school teacher, Phil Kelly. He would trudge across fields and farmland with his guitar to get a song from local singer John Norton. One of the first musicians he ever heard play traditional Irish music was his neighbor, uilleann piper Michael Cooney with whom, along with Paddy O’Brien, he would later form the band Chulrua. Pat began playing professionally when he moved to Westport, County Mayo, in the 1980s. He served his apprenticeship with the Dublin groups Old Bawn and De Min, and has since been a member of Idle Wall, and the Mayo-based traditional group Sheeaun.
Fiddle player Patrick Ourceau was born and raised in France, settled in New York City in 1989, and is now based in Toronto, Canada. Although he is mostly self-taught, Patrick’s fiddle playing has been greatly influenced and shaped by the music of the great County Clare and East County Galway musicians he has been in contact with over the years—not only from his many visits to Ireland and frequent meetings with fiddle players Paddy Canny and Peter O’Loughlin—but also from the great musicians living in New York City, particularly flute player Jack Coen from Woodford in County Galway. Patrick has been with Chulrua since 2003.
Links
http://www.chulrua.com
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